To thousands of commuters living in the northwest corridor, including Boulder County, the prospect of a mass transit system without rail is nothing short of a gigantic broken promise.

The promise, rail advocates say, was made by the Regional Transportation District more than seven years ago, when voters approved a sales tax increase to pay for FasTracks, which was then estimated to cost $4.7 billion. The project called for six new commuter train lines in the Denver metro area, including a 41-mile segment connecting Denver to Longmont via Broomfield, Louisville and Boulder.

University of Colorado at Denver professor Steve Beckman reads a book while riding the light rail home after work in Denver on Thursday.
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JEREMY PAPASSO
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But now the Northwest Rail Line -- the victim of higher-than-anticipated construction costs, lower-than-projected sales tax revenues, and a spiraling price tag -- is in danger. Late last year, RTD officials determined that the cost to establish the rail line had ballooned from $894 million to $1.7 billion, largely due to the high cost of sharing railroad tracks with Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

The new financial estimate prompted the agency to propose, for the first time, that the train be scrapped and replaced with a bus rapid transit system.

The reaction from those who have eagerly awaited commuter rail in the U.S. 36 corridor, and who have been dutifully paying since 2005 the 0.4 percent sales tax to fund it, has been blunt and matter-of-fact.

"I was fairly pissed," said Steve Poppitz, a semi-retiree from Louisville.

Last week, residents showed up at city halls in Longmont and Louisville to urge their elected leaders to push hard for the train. They said rail was what was promised and rail is what they should get.

"This is very inequitable," Poppitz said.

Mesa Construction's Robert Torres floats some concrete while working on RTD's West Line light rail track at 13th and Federal in Denver on March 1, 2012.
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Jeremy Papasso
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Fairness is at the root of the argument for keeping the Northwest Rail Line on track. Louisville Mayor Bob Muckle said bus rapid transit -- which mimics rail service by using dedicated lanes, faster schedules and stations with easy boarding -- would put the city at a "competitive disadvantage" when it comes to luring the best kind of residential and retail projects to town.

"You don't get the same development pattern around bus service as you do around rail service," he said. "The train is vital to our long-term character and economic vitality."

The RTD light rail comes to a stop in front of the University of Colorado s Auraria Campus in Denver on March 1, 2012.
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JEREMY PAPASSO
)

Poppitz, who owns property close to where a train depot in downtown Louisville would be located, said people in the northwest corridor have been paying the FasTracks tax with the full expectation commuter rail service would be part of the urban fabric one day. But so far, he said, the only train lines that have been built have been in the southern metro area.

"We're paying the same tax and not getting the same treatment," he said. "It was incredibly dumb we gave everyone south of I-70 what they wanted. Now what are the chances they're going to vote to give us what we want?"

Three options for RTD

The decision about what happens in the northwest corridor will ultimately come from metro area voters, perhaps as soon as this November, when RTD could put on the ballot a request for another 0.4 percent sales tax increase to get FasTracks completed by 2024.

But exactly what voters will be asked concerning the future of transit in the northwest corridor may be determined as early as this week. RTD staff is expected to recommend one of three options to the Board of Directors on Monday, all of which would require voter approval of a tax increase.

The first option calls for completion of the Northwest Rail Line but moves back its opening from 2020 to 2024. The second choice does the same but also provides interim bus service for the corridor, which would postpone completion of other FasTracks projects by approximately six months. The final option would do away with the train and replace it with a bus rapid transit system, or BRT.

With no tax increase, the rail corridor would be built, but not until 2042.

The board is scheduled to make a final decision on Thursday.

John Tayer, an RTD board member who represents a large chunk of Boulder County, worries that there hasn't been enough time to fully study the issue before this week's vote. He'd like more analysis to be done, even as discussions and negotiations between stakeholders continued right up through the end of last week.

"The big question is, 'How do we proceed for our corner in a way that provides us with the greatest benefit in the short term and the long term?'" Tayer said.

The way to not do it is swapping out rail service for BRT, Muckle said. The Louisville mayor said there isn't the infrastructure and rights of way available to widen roads for dedicated bus lanes in and around the city.

"I don't know where you're going to add managed lanes on South Boulder Road between 96th Street and U.S. 287," he said. "There's been no time to engineer these theoretical routes."

But, Muckle said, there is already an established railroad track that cuts through the heart of town.

"If you try to switch to anything except rail as was proposed in 2004, you're essentially engineering a transit solution on the fly," he said.

David Waldner, a partner in DELO LLC, said BRT is "not appropriate" for downtown Louisville and would essentially be a forced fit. DELO owns the land where the city's train station would go.

"A big part of Louisville's sense of place is the train running through town," Waldner said. "I don't think a bus rapid transit hub would attract development dollars."

A financial 'perfect storm'

RTD isn't delusional about the fact that a large segment of its service area is less than satisfied with how things are shaping up.

"Without question, this is a tough situation and we understand why people are upset," said Pauletta Tonilas, FasTracks spokeswoman. "We want to commit to building out FasTracks as intended, but we have to be cognizant of our financial realities."

Tonilas said the agency was struck by a "perfect storm" of financial setbacks in the last few years, with rising construction costs pushing the initial price tag for building the Northwest Rail Line from $460 million to $894 million. At the same time, total sales tax collections dropped more than 10 percent two years running in 2008 and 2009.

"The recession was a huge, huge piece of it," she said.

What was projected in 2004 to be $13.7 billion in FasTracks sales tax revenues collected by RTD over 30 years had, by 2011, sunk to $8 billion for the same time period, Tonilas said.

RTD General Manager Phil Washington, who was in Louisville last week for an appearance before the City Council, tried to explain the agency's financial quagmire as residents and council members decried the possible abandonment of rail. One resident even asked if RTD was ready to return tax proceeds collected in the corridor to the taxpayers.

"No one wants to build this thing more than we do -- we're married to this thing," Washington responded. "But you balance that with financial realities and you balance that with the other player you have out here, and that's called the railroad."

The northwest corridor has always been different from every other transit corridor in the metro area, largely because of its substantial length -- it's nearly twice as long as the next-longest FasTracks line -- and because its right of way isn't under RTD ownership. With the exception of a six-mile segment from Denver to south Westminster where RTD is building its own tracks, the agency has to negotiate access and usage with Burlington Northern Santa Fe, which owns the tracks from Westminster to Longmont and runs freights trains on them daily.

Following a more detailed engineering study last year of the shared use, BNSF came to RTD with a list of additional costs. Among them was the need to purchase more rights of way; do additional environmental mitigation and utility relocations; and make up-front payments for operating time slots on the tracks rather than amortizing them over time.

"Our estimate was based on the best available information at the time," Tonilas said. "It wasn't like we were pulling numbers out of the air. A lot of analysis went into getting to the $894 million number."

She said RTD is doing its best to grapple with the new cost estimates while still providing the northwest corridor with the best possible service. And bus rapid transit could well be the solution, she said.

"Things change -- and the bottom line is determining the best way to provide service to the northwest area," Tonilas said. "The only question is, 'Will that come in the form of a train or enhanced bus rapid transit?'"

Boulder embraces BRT

Boulder Mayor Matt Appelbaum isn't afraid to stick up for BRT as a perfectly good alternative to commuter rail.

There are examples worldwide of fast and efficient BRT service, especially in Brazil and Colombia. And the initial parts of a BRT system -- which is not currently part of FasTracks -- are already being built along U.S. 36. Construction of managed lanes gets underway there next month.

"I think you can make a case for rail, but I think you have to look at in the context of what the region will support and in the context of mobility," Appelbaum said. "From a mobility standpoint, the train doesn't work as well as buses do."

RTD projects that BRT would run far more frequently -- every three minutes during peak hours on the Boulder-to-Denver segment -- versus rail, which would run every 20 minutes during peak times on the same segment. It also has lower operations and maintenance costs, has the flexibility to serve more destinations, and would be ready to go four years earlier than rail.

While Appelbaum doesn't think the northwest corridor has been treated fairly by RTD when it comes to FasTracks prioritization, he said that rail in the northwest corridor was always a difficult proposition given the complex relationship between the railroad and RTD.

The mayor said Boulder is moving ahead with development of a transit-oriented project at 30th and Pearl streets, regardless of commuter rail. Known as Boulder Junction, the 160-acre complex would be home to a hotel, hundreds of residential units, and a 60,000-square-foot underground RTD bus station.

"It's going to be a BRT terminal -- that's what's driving development right now," he said.

And though Longmont still wants the train, the city is prepared for its future transit hub at First Avenue and Main Street to be a BRT station as well.

"We're good to go either way," said Phil Greenwald, Longmont's transportation planner.

But Longmont Mayor Dennis Coombs said that doesn't mean the city won't keep fighting for the rail line it was promised in 2004. Last week, Longmont City Council voted 5-2 to support the second option on the table -- a train by 2024 with improved bus service in the meantime.

Once again, he said, it comes down to a fundamental issue of fairness.

"It's not fair for us to be spending all this money and having it shipped down so everyone else can build their train lines," Coombs said.

Muckle, Louisville's mayor, said some residents in the city are so incensed at the possibility of seeing commuter rail taken off the drawing board that they've asked him if Louisville can withdraw from RTD.

"You have to accept that someone has to go last but that doesn't mean you don't get what you were told you'd get and that you planned your land use choices around," he said. "A promise was made, and we've held up our side of the bargain and we should get what we deserve."

Segmentation solution?

Whether the northwest corridor gets what it was promised won't be known until later this week. But a glimmer of hope for the locomotive crowd appeared as recently as the last few days.

The transit advocacy group 36 Commuting Solutions sent a letter to RTD asking the agency to slow down its decision-making process so that it could study a purported willingness from BNSF to consider a phased, segment-by-segment, approach to accommodating commuter rail on its tracks.

Boulder County Commissioner Will Toor said there is even talk bubbling up about pushing for a two-year delay in going to the ballot for additional FasTracks tax money.

"Things are very fluid right now," he said Friday.

In an email, BNSF spokesman Andy Williams didn't specifically address segmenting but wrote that the railroad "will continue to work with RTD on the levels of service they wish to study and pursue."

RTD spokeswoman Tonilas said she has heard nothing about postponing a ballot initiative on FasTracks but said agency staff would be working right up until Monday to bring to the board the best possible set of options they can.

"We have left no stone unturned in looking at all the possibilities," she said.

Coombs, Longmont's mayor, said he can only hope that the desire to build a lasting transit system that people look upon with pride for years to come prevails over the shorter-term wish to save money and build something less permanent.

"Hopefully, 50 years from now, people will look back and say, 'Wow, I'm glad they dug in their heels and didn't settle for anything less than a train,'" he said.

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